Yellow Warbler - Paruline jaune
When I first started getting serious about birding, my friend Paul was a great teacher - not only about songs and other means of identification, but about behaviours. This in turn made a lot of difference when he encouraged me to pick up a camera. Behaviour is a very important part, in my experience, of finding and photographing birds.
A great example was learning that warbler flocks of varying sizes will sweep across an area, pulling insects from under leaves and along stems of trees and shrubs. If you see or hear one warbler, there are likely more, and including different species. In migration periods, Black-capped Chickadees are often the noisiest and most obvious members of these mobile flocks.
As a result, we would often hear or see a bird, and then hunker down, waiting for the mixed flock to move around or over us. Many of my warbler images come from this strategy, and its corollary: don’t chase birds. Chasing never works, especially with some of the more elusive species. Waiting for them to reveal themselves doesn’t always work, but chasing almost never works.
In any event: I was in such a situation recently, and I simply froze in the woods. To minimize intimidating movement with my camera, I held it close to my face, and listened to the birds moving around me. A Yellow Warbler is not a rare bird by any stretch here - they breed in our area before heading back south - but it was a good example of the phenomenon of stationary birding. There were a couple of Nashville Warblers, a Blackburnian, and some Vireos along with the Yellow, but those images were not as good an illustration of what I am describing. This bird was combing through a bush right beside me, and my having frozen in place made a neat encounter possible.
Yellow Warbler - Paruline jaune
When I first started getting serious about birding, my friend Paul was a great teacher - not only about songs and other means of identification, but about behaviours. This in turn made a lot of difference when he encouraged me to pick up a camera. Behaviour is a very important part, in my experience, of finding and photographing birds.
A great example was learning that warbler flocks of varying sizes will sweep across an area, pulling insects from under leaves and along stems of trees and shrubs. If you see or hear one warbler, there are likely more, and including different species. In migration periods, Black-capped Chickadees are often the noisiest and most obvious members of these mobile flocks.
As a result, we would often hear or see a bird, and then hunker down, waiting for the mixed flock to move around or over us. Many of my warbler images come from this strategy, and its corollary: don’t chase birds. Chasing never works, especially with some of the more elusive species. Waiting for them to reveal themselves doesn’t always work, but chasing almost never works.
In any event: I was in such a situation recently, and I simply froze in the woods. To minimize intimidating movement with my camera, I held it close to my face, and listened to the birds moving around me. A Yellow Warbler is not a rare bird by any stretch here - they breed in our area before heading back south - but it was a good example of the phenomenon of stationary birding. There were a couple of Nashville Warblers, a Blackburnian, and some Vireos along with the Yellow, but those images were not as good an illustration of what I am describing. This bird was combing through a bush right beside me, and my having frozen in place made a neat encounter possible.